ECEP/PELABAY-CTP · European citizenship education: towards which patriotism? a normative analysis of civic education on the eu scale

Final Activity Report Summary - ECEP/PELABAY-CTP (European Citizenship Education: towards which Patriotism? A normative analysis of civic education on the EU scale.)

The ECEP project intended to examine the type of patriotism that a ‘European citizenship education’ could, or should, encourage among European citizens. More precisely, the research aimed to clarify both the foundations and the stakes behind the attempt to put into practice European citizenship through educational programmes. With this aim in view, the following questions were investigated: 1. how to foster a sense of belonging and allegiance to European institutions and 2. how to reach the political unity and cohesion of the European polity given the diversity that inescapably characterised the European Union (EU). To address these questions, the research was conducted in the framework of an ‘applied political philosophy’. The literature on European integration addressed the issue of European citizenship from a rather empirical, functionalist, or institutional approach. Here, the focus was on normative theory. Therefore the ECEP research was carried out through an interdisciplinary methodology, combining an in-depth analysis of contemporary theories about democratic citizenship, such as political liberalism, republicanism, multiculturalism as well as cosmopolitanism, with a practical reflection about some concrete problems that were currently raised by the process of European integration, such as the ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU. The project reached a non-trivial understanding of the ‘unity and diversity dilemma’ within the EU, tackling thus the problem of creating new forms of solidarity within deeply divided societies. Briefly stated, the results of the project were as follows: 1. ‘European citizenship education’ neither could nor should be conceived and implemented as a mere transposition of civic education from the nation state to a larger, i.e. European, scale. 2. the inescapable existence of ‘reasonable disagreements’ about the European identity and of a ‘deep diversity’ of allegiances to the EU defeated such transposition. 3. the ‘post-unanimist’ nature of the democratic life within the EU called for a ‘processual’ pattern of political integration, identification and legitimation and, in turn, 4. this worked towards the design of a ‘European citizenship education’ which should avoid the homogenising and exclusionary effects stemming from a ‘communitarian’ view of the EU.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз